Qualcomm and MediaTek are betting big on India’s IoT market, and are reportedly to be working with various device makers and telecom service providers to drive the IoT ecosystem in India, especially focusing on the narrow-band IoT (NB-IoT) segment.
Kuldeep Malik, country head for corporate sales international, MediaTek told ET that they do see a big potential in the IoT space, especially NB-IoT. He further informed that MediaTek already has an IoT ecosystem ready with its module or device vendors.
Jim Cathey, SVP and president, APAC & India, Qualcomm told ET that Qualcomm is focused on driving IoT through its collaboration with small startups to enable consumer and industrial IoT along with smart city use cases in India. Qualcomm’s director of business development, Uday Dodla separately said that the company has been building an “effective ecosystem of OEM and ODM collaborators to serve both consumer and industrial IoT segment.”
Various reports states that Qualcomm is collaborating its device partners to serve both consumer and industrial IoT segments, across applications like smart wearables, vision-intelligent cameras, extended reality devices, point-of-sale products and smart energy metering. It also has a “Design in India” program to give a push to the IoT space.
At present both the chipmakers are working with Indian telecom operators for certification, and compliance testing of devices on their IoT networks. MediaTek said that that it is working with its device partners to conduct interoperability tests with Indian telecom operators, and is targeting various segments with various partners.
Qualcomm’s solutions and close association with Indian network operators help OEMs provide devices that bridge between traditional cellular technologies and newer technologies like LTE- IoT, Dodla said. He further said that the Indian IoT ecosystem is poised to grow rapidly, supported by the government’s heightened focus on developing Smart City projects and Digital India campaigns. Malik, however, said that the IoT market is “fragmented and unorganized”, and it will only start to shape-up properly by early next year.
